TORONTO (Reuters)  Workers at a Toyota car plant
just outside Toronto voted Friday on whether to become the first unionized Japanese-owned
auto facility in North America, a move that could have a snowball effect elsewhere.

Results of the Canadian Auto Workers' (CAW) membership
drive at the Toyota plant in Cambridge, Ontario, will not be available until
July 31 at the earliest.

But the union's bid for recognition and collective bargaining
rights has already affected the plant's labor costs, whether it succeeds or
not, said Sean McAlinden, director of the economics and business group at the
center for automotive research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

And if unionization does succeed, it could have a domino
effect on other foreign-owned plants, and especially Japanese plants, McAlinden
said.

"This would be an enormous victory for the Canadian Auto
Workers and for unions in North America. Any other union deals with Japanese
auto plants have been joint-ventures with the Big Three American manufacturers,"
McAlinden said.

"Toyota is fiercely proud, like Honda, of the fact that
their workers generally don't believe that they need a union  that the
management/worker relationship is such that unions are superfluous," he added.

Ontario assembles about 17% of all the vehicles assembled
in North America, which is more than the state of Michigan  home to motor
city Detroit, McAlinden said.

The Canadian units of U.S. plants are mostly unionized,
but the CAW and its American counterpart, the United Auto Workers, have so far
been unsuccessful in unionizing Japanese-owned facilities.

Toyota has already said it considers the vote illegal and
Ontario's Board of Labor will rule on the case this week.

Debate revolves around whether the CAW has represented
enough of the plant workers to form a fair bargaining unit.

Toyota says the union needs to include about another 500
workers in its balloting. The union says these are part-time and managerial
workers who should not have a say in the future of the other 1,950 full-time
employees on the plant floor.

Toyota is afraid that any union could disrupt production
and affect its "participatory style of business." But it remains confident that
its workers will vote no, said Greig Mordue, an official at the Toyota plant
in Cambridge, Ontario.

CAW spokesman Paul Forder said the union is not about getting
the workers better wages and benefits, but about giving them "some power to
control their destiny."

The Cambridge plant was cited as having the "best quality
for car production" in plants in North America in a recent survey from U.S.-based
J.D. Powers & Assoc. It produces mostly the Toyota Corolla, a popular compact
car.